SwitchBot’s new humanoid house robot, the Onero H1, is the latest CES gadget promising to take laundry and a bunch of other chores off your hands, at least in the demo reel version of your life. It is pitched as “the most accessible AI household robot,” which is a polite way of saying it is meant to be the one you actually buy, not just a wild concept sitting in a lab video.​

At first glance, the Onero H1 looks like someone grafted a friendly robot torso onto a rolling base and taught it to live in your kitchen and laundry room. It is not a full-on bipedal android: there are articulated arms, hands, and a simple “face,” but no legs, just a wheeled platform that roams around like an upgraded smart vacuum with ideas above its station. That design choice is intentional; wheels are still much more practical than walking robots in homes with flat floors, even if stairs remain their natural enemy.​

What makes SwitchBot confident enough to say this thing can do your laundry is the combination of hardware and on-device AI that sits under the glossy shell. The robot has cameras not just in its head but also in its arms, hands, and midsection, giving it depth perception and a constant stream of visual data about where objects are and how they are oriented. On top of that, it runs an on-device “OmniSense” vision-language-action model, essentially a compact multimodal AI that fuses what it sees, what it feels, and what it is asked to do into actions like grasping, pushing, opening, and organizing. In plain terms, you can point it at a messy counter or a pile of clothes, give it instructions, and it is supposed to figure out how to interact with things rather than follow a rigid, pre-programmed script.​

The company’s own demo video is where the laundry promise comes to life. In that carefully produced montage, Onero fills a coffee machine, makes breakfast, wipes windows, loads a washing machine, then folds shirts and puts them away like he has been doing for years. The robot uses its 22 degrees of freedom in its joints to move its arms with enough finesse to pick up soft fabrics, hold a button-up shirt at the shoulders, and fold it in a recognizably human way rather than just rolling garments into a ball. It is a long way from the stiff arm sweeps of earlier home robots and obviously meant to tap directly into that fantasy of coming home to magically folded laundry.​

Of course, there is a well-known gap between “demo at CES” and “working flawlessly in your cluttered apartment with random socks everywhere.” Laundry is notoriously hard to automate because clothes are floppy, inconsistent in shape, and often half-tangled with other items, and most existing “laundry folding robots” have either been extremely expensive, extremely slow, or both. SwitchBot is clearly aware of that, which is why it keeps emphasizing that the Onero’s model can learn and adapt across different home layouts and tasks instead of needing a perfectly staged space. But even with better AI, a wheeled robot is still at the mercy of your home’s physical reality: stairs, narrow hallways, overstuffed laundry baskets, and doors that do not fully swing open.​

The laundry angle becomes even more interesting when you zoom out and look at what everyone else is doing at CES this year. LG is showing off its own humanoid, CLOiD, that it claims can fold laundry, unload the dishwasher, and even retrieve food from the oven, all positioned as part of a “zero labor home” pitch. LG’s robot has a more obviously humanoid upper body with two articulated arms and a head-like unit with a display and sensors, and it doubles as a smart home hub that plays nicely with LG’s ThinQ ecosystem of appliances. At CES, LG is literally demonstrating CLOiD starting laundry cycles, folding clothes, and serving food, which puts it in very similar territory to SwitchBot’s laundry robot narrative.​

Then you have Samsung’s Ballie on the other end of the spectrum: a rolling, ball-shaped assistant that does not try to fold your T-shirts but instead follows you around, projects information or movies on the wall, and controls other smart home devices. Ballie is less “robot butler” and more animated smart home UI, acting as a moving interface for lights, AC, and security cameras rather than taking a direct swing at laundry or dishwashing. SwitchBot’s Onero is somewhere in between LG’s more appliance-centric humanoid and Samsung’s projector pet—it has arms and hands like CLOiD but is tightly woven into an existing ecosystem of little bots and gadgets more akin to Ballie’s orchestration role.​

That ecosystem angle might be SwitchBot’s quiet advantage. The company has already built a business around little mechanical helpers that press light switches, open curtains, or retrofit locks, plus robot vacuums, air purifiers, and other smart home gear. Onero H1 is framed as the next step in that evolution: a generalist robot that can both carry out physical tasks and orchestrate the specialized bots already in your home. In practice, that could look less like a single robot doing literally everything and more like a conductor that occasionally steps off the podium to move a laundry basket or wipe a window itself.​

The hardware numbers back up that ambition to be more than a rolling arm. With 22 degrees of freedom, the Onero’s joints give it enough independent movements to do more nuanced actions than a simple industrial arm at the end of a platform, even if it is still shy of the 29 degrees of freedom in the upper body of Boston Dynamics’ Atlas. Multiple depth-sensing cameras and tactile feedback in its grippers aim to prevent it from crushing fragile items or misjudging the edge of a table, both of which are the kinds of mistakes that make people very nervous about robots operating near expensive appliances and, well, their pets. And because the AI runs on-device rather than streaming constantly to the cloud, there is at least a nod to privacy and low-latency responsiveness, which matters when a robot is roaming around bedrooms and laundry rooms.​

But for all of the technical detail and polished demos, the questions most people will ask are much simpler: How much is it? When can I actually get it? And will it really save time, or will it feel like having a high-maintenance roommate on wheels? SwitchBot has not announced pricing yet, only saying that the Onero H1 and its A1 robotic arms will be available for preorder on its website “soon,” which suggests this is closer to product than pure concept but still leaves plenty of wiggle room. Given how other humanoid or laundry-focused robots have been priced in the past, it is hard to imagine this landing in typical robot vacuum territory, so “accessible” probably does not mean “impulse buy.”​

The broader trend, though, is clear: laundry is becoming a kind of benchmark chore for the smart home robotics arms race. LG’s CLOiD is promising to fold and serve breakfast, SwitchBot’s Onero is promising to handle washing, folding, and general tidying, and other companies have spent years trying—and often failing—to bring standalone laundry-folding machines to market. Laundry sits at the intersection of everything hard about domestic robotics: irregular objects, soft materials, a need for gentle but precise manipulation, and a workflow that spans multiple devices (washer, dryer, closet) in different rooms. Whoever truly cracks that in a reliable, affordable way will not just win the CES hype cycle; they will probably define what the next generation of home robots looks like.​

For now, Onero H1 feels like a fascinating, slightly uncanny step toward that future rather than the final answer. In a carefully controlled CES booth, it can absolutely load a washer, fold a shirt, and wipe a window, and that alone is a big leap from the days when “home robot” meant a bump-and-run vacuum that occasionally ate your charging cable. Whether it can do your laundry in the real world—dodging laundry baskets, rogue Lego pieces, and half-closed doors—will depend on how robust that on-device AI really is and how much compromise you are willing to make in how your home is laid out.​

So yes, SwitchBot says its humanoid robot can do your laundry, and in the best-case scenario, that might be exactly what it does one day while you head out the door. But as with most bold CES promises, the smarter way to think about Onero H1 is as a signpost: a glimpse of a home where robots are no longer just vacuuming in the background, but actively handling the stuff you are most tired of doing, one carefully folded shirt at a time.